


burn down the house of my regrets

by dytabytes



Category: Monster Prom (Visual Novel)
Genre: Ambiguous Player Character, Multi, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 12:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15461847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dytabytes/pseuds/dytabytes
Summary: Sometimes, you really want to date a guy, but your stats aren't cooperating with you, and the looming doom of Monster Prom forces you to woo someone else... unless you get lucky, and a Special Ending Route opens the door to a Good Ending.





	burn down the house of my regrets

With Monster Prom coming up, your lack of relationship status is concerning. You need to secure a date, or your future is going to be just as garbage as your high school experience has been.

Secretly, in the depths of your heart, you’ll admit that you’ve always liked Liam. There's something about that fancy vampire with his nose in the air and his head in the clouds that always seems to draw your eye. The thing is, he's totally out of your league. 

Liam is an intellectual genius with a flair for haute couture and the avant garde. He's one of the select few cool enough to hang out with Vera Oberlin and actually _talk_ to her. Meanwhile, you're just kind of a loser. Your grades are in the dumpster, you're too poor to buy any upgrades, and you’ve got a lack of brain-to-mouth filter that just won't quit. It keeps your head above water in theatre, where it fuels your improv skills, but mostly your tendency towards blunt statements means that you get a lot of people trying to kick the shit out of you. 

But whatever, so you don’t have smarts or class. You’ve split your knuckles on enough faces that you figure you might be able to catch Damien’s attention if you try at it. Fortune favours the bold, right? 

The last three weeks have been a weird mashup of setting things on fire, stealing shit, and jumping headlong into brawls, all to get the attention of a certain boy who loves nothing more than arson and punching. It’s working, you think. You hope? The last time Damien punched you in the face, he kissed his fist after, which has got to bode well. 

You sigh, pushing your fingers through your hair. To be honest, things might have gone better if you hadn’t split your attention the last three weeks by surreptitiously helping Miranda in her quest to set up Liam as Prom King. But how could you have resisted? She’d asked you so nicely, and even though you’d given up on catching his attention as a date, you couldn’t kill the thought of Liam strutting around with his stupid snaggle-fanged grin while bedecked in a glittery crown and scepter. He'd just be too cute?

So you'd lost some time running errands and finagling serfs when you should have been showing off your wild side in the most destructive ways possible.

Oh well, you can't change the past. Prom is tomorrow, and you’re still not sure that Damien’s going to say yes when you ask him, so it's time to take desperate measures. 

You’re on your way to do a couple lines of coke in the woods with Polly. Drugs aren’t your thing, but this is your Hail Mary to try to make yourself more Fun with a Capital F. It’s gross, but. Well. Monster Prom.

The forest is full of weird shadows, and you're preoccupied with daymares of living on the streets, so it's no wonder that you startle when someone catches you by the shoulder.

“Fuck!”

You’re already smashing your fist towards your assailant when you recognize his face. You can’t pull back, so you hastily pull up, swinging your arm over Liam’s shoulder and crashing your body directly into his.

“Gah!” The two of you tumble to the forest floor in a tangle.

“Shit, Liam! Don’t scare me like that!” You push yourself up on your knees, brushing leaves and twigs off yourself. 

“Hnn." Liam groans and rubs at his head as he sits up. "Your situational awareness is usually fairly decent. I assumed you would hear me coming.”

“Uh. Yeah, I guess my guard was down.” You sigh and stand. “I’ve been distracted by, you know. End of the year Prom Shit.”

“Ah, right. Yes. Prom Shit is on all our minds right now.” Liam sighs and shakes leaves out of his clothes, smoothing his suspenders back in place.

“Exactly.” With a weak smile, you offer him a hand. “Still, it was pretty uncool of me to smack you like that, so. Sorry and stuff.”

“I accept your apology.” Liam lets you lever him up, stumbling a bit when you pull him to his feet. In your anxiety, maybe you’re using too much force?

Silence hangs over the two of you as you linger. You feel like you should probably go, but you don't want to leave quite yet. You scuff your toe in the dirt as you ask, “So, um. Were you just trying to jump-scare me or...?”

“Ah.” Liam looks away. “No, ironically, I had a question for you on the topic of prom.” 

You blink. 

“Is everything alright with the Kingship nomination?” You can’t think of anything else he’d come out to the forest to find you about.

Liam pauses, then pulls his glasses off to wipe them on his shirt. “The nomination is fine. Yours truly has accepted the crown, and Miranda has a firm hold on the rest of the planning.” It’s hard to read his expression when his head is tilted down like that, and it leaves you feeling distinctly nervous. 

“Then, uh, what’s going on?”

“Hm.” Liam huffs and sets his glasses back on his face. “A good question.”

He trails off, looking up at the stars that peek through the forest branches. Before you can ask what he means, Liam looks up. 

"Let me attempt to elucidate my thought process." He folds his arms over his chest and starts to pace. 

“I have lived for over four hundred years. I have seen things you could never imagined, experienced events the likes of which will never happen again." He turns on his heel and dramatically stabs a finger in your direction. "I’ve done all this, and yet never before has anyone worked so hard to obtain for me something which I so actively avoided and despised as _popularity_.”

You flinch away, dropping eye contact as you shrink into yourself.

“Fuck, I’m sorry! I thought-”

“No! No, this isn’t coming out right.” Liam grabs your shoulder, turning you back towards him. “I didn’t want to be popular, and I didn’t want to be Prom King, but I realize now that living that kind of cliche is exactly what I needed. It’s so unoriginal, so overdone! It’s going to be the peak of unexpected actions to do something so mundane.”

He has stars in his eyes as he sighs, “So authentic.”, and you have to bite your lip to keep from smiling at how endearing his expression is.

“But I digress.” Liam pulls at his collar as he clears his throat. “I realized that if I really want to reach peak cliche, a Prom King needs to have a Prom Queen. At first, I thought that Mira would be the perfect partner. She’s pink, frilly, and utterly uninterested in me. We’d be Prom Royalty without any sort of love connection. What a twist to the classic trope!”

You nod, not quite able to follow Liam’s train of thought, but delighted that he’s delighted.

Liam starts to pace again, pushing his hand through his hair and sending strands of it flying.

“As I thought about it, though, I realized that I was going at this all wrong. Going to Prom with Miranda would be a statement, but it would be shallow, a simple variation on the theme instead of true disruption of the norm. Monster Prom is such a culturally important event that everyone spends their high school years fighting to woo some sucker into being their escort. There’s so many loveless couples on the floor that true irony, ah!” 

He halts in his tracks, throwing his hands out with a passionate force.

“True irony would be going to prom with someone I for whom I felt something truly ... Romantic. And the only person who fits that category is you.”

Your breath catches in your throat as Liam kneels and takes your hand, fingers tight around your own. 

“You have given me things which I did not know I needed, anticipated trends before they were even a twinkle in the horizon and laid at my feet a bounty of riches which I could not even comprehend. I truly appreciate that.”

“It… it was no problem?” Your voice is a bare squeak. You have no idea what's going on here, but you don't want it to end.

“No, it is a problem of epic proportions, because you don’t understand what you've come to mean to me!” The night is chasing the sun out of the sky, and Liam’s eyes are starting to glow in the deepening shadows.

“You hold my heart, so unused and inexperienced, a dead, lifeless thing with so little idea of what it's doing. You hold my heart,” Liam clutches your palm to his chest. “And you make it want to beat.”

“Oh.” You’re so full of emotion that your hand is shaking even though it's still pressed to Liam's body. You don't know what to do with this level of poetic declaration. “Oh wow.”

“So please, stop trying to attract that demon who hasn't a creative bone in his body. Let's tear down everyone's mundane expectations for this event and turn it into art.” Liam is almost in tears. “Be my Prom Consort.”

You bite your lip and cradle Liam's hands in your own, rubbing your thumb over his.

“I'm not poetic like you. I know in a perfect world, I'd respond with a matching speech, but I can't make a declaration as dramatic and heart wrenching as yours, so I won't even try.”

You kneel, and draw Liam's hands up to your mouth to kiss his knuckles. He inhales sharply when your lips touch his skin, then full-on gasps when you follow up by whipping out your phone to take a photo of your joined hands.

“Help me figure out the perfect tags for Instagram. Is #goingtopromwiththecoolestguyinschool too on the nose?”

“As said coolest guy, I wish it weren't, but my aesthetic sense won't allow a hashtag that long and unwieldy. Budge over. Let's make this a masterpiece.”

You spend over half an hour crafting the perfect post, and it's so worth it. It gets thousands of likes and comments. Most of them are probably Miranda's serf bots, but hey. You're going to Monster Prom with the Prom King, and more than that, you might even keep dating Liam for real afterwards. 

Wow.


End file.
